Night of the Saboteurs

The Overlook

By Tom Clavin

“The Overlook” appears every Wednesday at tomclavin.substack.com and now also reaches over 100,000 readers on thehistoryreader.com. If you enjoy the column, please "like" it and let me know what you think by commenting (check out previous ones while you're at it).  Likes, comments, and shares help with author “discoverability” on Substack.com, and all support is appreciated. Don't forget to hit the ‘Subscribe’ button – it’s free!

Many people on eastern Long Island are aware that this coming Sunday is the 80th anniversary of the landing of Nazi saboteurs on the beach in Amagansett, and no doubt there will be a couple of events to commemorate that. The somewhat familiar story is that all eight of the men were apprehended rather quickly before they could do any harm. But the story behind the story is: Whatever happened to them?

The mission that originated in Berlin earlier in 1942 was headed by Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, leader of the Abwehr. In World War I, he had arranged to send German agents into the U.S. to attack arms factories. He figured he could repeat that ploy with Operation Pastorius. It was named after a German teacher and lawyer Francis Daniel Pastorius, born in 1651, who emigrated and became the founder of Germantown, Pennsylvania, the first permanent German-American settlement and the site of a defeat of American colonists by British forces during the American Revolution.

                Canaris recruited eight German men who had previously lived and worked in the U.S., two of whom were still American citizens. They were given three weeks of intense sabotage training at a German High Command school near Berlin, which included the use of explosives. A fake background biography was created for each man, and they were immersed in reading American newspapers and magazines to improve their English and knowledge of American culture.

          On the night of June 12, 1942, four of the eight men were deposited by a submarine on what is now Atlantic Avenue Beach in Amagansett, in the Town of East Hampton. They wore German Navy uniforms so that if captured immediately they would become prisoners of war, not executed as spies. Once on dry land, the German put on civilian clothes and set off on what they expected would be a lengthy sabotage career. The four other saboteurs landed four nights later at Ponte Vedra Beach, south of Jacksonville in Florida. They boarded a train to Chicago.

          One of the Germans in Amagansett, George John Dasch, was discovered by John Cullen, a Coast Guardsman. Cullen pretended to accept  $260 bribe and went off to report finding a suspicious man on the beach. By the time an armed patrol returned, the four would-be saboteurs had hiked up to Main Street and boarded a LIRR train to Manhattan. They checked into a hotel and probably thought they were good to go, but a massive manhunt had begun.

          The game plan was that the two groups of Germans were to rendezvous in Cincinnati and then begin sabotage activities. However, as we now know, Operation Pastorius did not get very far. Here is why: Dasch got cold feet.  He called one of the other spies, Ernst Burger, into his hotel room and confided that he had no intention of going through with the mission, hated Nazism, and planned to report the plot to the FBI. Apparently not much of a hardened Nazi either, Burger agreed to defect to the U.S.

          On June 15, Dasch phoned the New York office of the FBI to explain who he was but hung up when the agent answering doubted his story. Four days later, he took a train to Washington D.C. and walked into FBI headquarters, where he gained the attention of Assistant Director D. M. Ladd by showing him the operation's budget of $84,000 cash. Over the next two weeks, Burger and the other six were arrested. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, never one to miss an opportunity, made no mention that Dasch had turned himself in and claimed credit for cracking the spy ring.

          Things did not turn out well for the other six German agents who had been betrayed. President Franklin Roosevelt issued Executive Proclamation 2561 on July 2 creating a military tribunal to prosecute the Germans. Four charges were levied against all eight prisoners having to do with violating the Articles of War. The trial began on July 8 in the Department of Justice building in Washington D.C. Lawyers for the accused attempted to have the case tried in a civilian court but were rebuffed by the U.S. Supreme Court.

          The trial lasted three weeks, then on August 3, all eight Germans were found guilty and sentenced to death. Roosevelt commuted Burger's sentence to life in prison and Dasch's to 30 years because they had turned themselves in and provided information about the others. Only five days later, the remaining six saboteurs were escorted to the third floor of the District of Columbia jail and, one by one, were executed in an electric chair. Their bodies were buried in a potter’s field that later became a neighborhood known as Blue Plains.

In 1948, President Harry Truman granted executive clemency to Dasch and Burger on the condition that they be deported to Germany. The two men were not welcomed back because they were regarded as traitors who had caused the death of their colleagues. Although they had been promised pardons by Hoover in exchange for their cooperation, both men passed away without ever receiving them. Dasch died in 1992 at the age of 89; Burger had died 17 years earlier.

Sometime in the early 1970s, the National Socialist White People’s Party placed a monument to the executed spies in a thicket in southwest Washington D.C. on National Park Service land. It went largely unknown and ignored for several decades, then in 2010 the Park Service removed it.

Tom Clavin is the bestselling author/co-author of 18 books including the bestsellers Blood and Treasure (with Bob Drury) and Lightning Down. To purchase a copy, please go to your local bookstore or to Bookshop.org, Amazon.com, BN.com, or tomclavin.com.